It’s been a productive month! Released WriteFreely v0.15.1, our sub.club integration, and free Write.as accounts. Free accounts have been especially nice — over just a couple days, daily signups are 4 times higher than what they were before, and we’ve seen more upgrades too.
I’m working on WriteFreely v0.16 now, with a ton of new features that people should enjoy. I’m hoping to have that out by November 9 — six years after our very first release. I also have a ton of updates planned for November on Write.as that I can’t wait to share with everyone.
Besides that, I’ve been posting more on the fediverse, Threads, Bluesky, and even LinkedIn (😬) to get the word out more. We’ve had a long period of slow progress, and now I want to start ramping up again.
#WriteFreely #Writeas #business #updates #progress
Thoughts? Discuss...
A lot of dev planning today, thinking about the next two WriteFreely releases. As I mentioned on @dev@musing.studio, the goal is to basically bring WF into parity with Write.as, including support for photos, which is a long-request feature.
I’m excited for these next updates, as they’ll really move the product forward and give more people access to everything we’ve built here. You can see what’s next for WF (and beyond) on our project tracker.
#WriteFreely #WriteFreelyDev #dev
Thoughts? Discuss...
I’ve been much more organized and focused over the last several weeks. Trying to stay on top of emails and forum posts; got the latest WriteFreely release out this weekend; supported the launch of the Social Web Foundation; working on a new Write.as integration; and finishing up another Write.as change, also announcing this week.
It’s nice to feel on top of things again, and I’m excited for what’s coming down the line for the rest of the year. Maybe oddly, fall and winter feel like the best time to buckle down and work.
#WriteFreely #Writeas #life
Thoughts? Discuss...
Some priorities for new Write.as development at the moment:
Better fediverse integration. It’s time to make the platform more social, and of course we’ll do it with ActivityPub. ”Likes” you get from the fediverse show up on Write.as now (I still need to announce this), and replies will be next.
Importing posts. Other publishing platforms are doing some bad things right now, and I see many people looking for alternatives like Write.as. We’ll start with importing from Substack, then move on to support for other platforms.
Draft posts. Writers have had to work around the shortcomings of Anonymous posts here (called “Drafts” on WriteFreely) for too long, so it’s time to implement true drafts, with the ability to see posts and schedule them before finally publishing. This will also support migration from other platforms, and retain any imported drafts.
#fediverse #ActivityPub #WriteAs #WriteFreely #writeasdev
Thoughts? Discuss...
Shipping soon: native support for Markdown and HTML in blog descriptions!
This was a long-requested feature, and there’s really no reason not to support it — both Snap.as and our future Remark.as support it. Now you can do things like verify your blog for Mastodon and elsewhere in the IndieWeb.
Further reading: dev task T874, WriteFreely PR #531.
#dev #WriteFreely
Thoughts? Discuss...
An idea occurred to me last month. All along, I’ve been pursuing this idea of “separate but connected apps.” But as I’ve started implementing them, and later with the release of WriteFreely, I’ve had to change my view on what that “connected” part meant. It turns out that they need to be not just connected, but highly integrated in some important ways, if I want to give people the best experience.
An easy example is the photo upload feature in our Classic editor. Previously you had to switch apps to upload a photo, then switch back to insert it into your blog post. Now it’s a part of the Write.as interface, and seamlessly powered by Snap.as behind the scenes. You don’t even have to know Snap.as exists to use it — but if you do, you can do things like manage your photos through this separate tool. Maybe that’s where the separation actually makes sense.
So this idea I had was: some sort of unifying interface. Open it and decide whether you’re writing (Write.as) or uploading photos (Snap.as) or reading (Read Write.as) or checking your inbox (Remark.as). Each action points you to the correct product, and each product contains elements of the others, where it makes sense. For anyone fully utilizing our ecosystem, this could fit them best, while not disturbing those who just need one tool or the other. Importantly, the model could also fit WriteFreely, so it’s no longer just a blogging platform, but actually a multi-application tool (kind of like Phabricator).
#suite #studio #WriteFreely #snapas #remarkas
Thoughts? Discuss...
This morning I chatted with Matthew Guay on Racket (a cool short-form audio service) about WriteFreely and what kinds of things I’m hoping to solve with it. You can listen to the 9-minute talk here:
“The WriteFreely story.”
#WriteFreely #audio #origins
Thoughts? Discuss...
Just pushed some final changes for #WriteFreely v0.13, specifically the exclusive content feature powered by Web Monetization. I wasn’t going to include this in WF yet, since it previously required setting up an additional receipt verifier server. But now that there’s a publicly available receipt verifier, WF admins and users can enable this feature without any extra setup. Once I do a little more testing, I’ll merge that and then release v0.13!
Thoughts? Discuss...
As I wrote in a recent fediverse thread, I’m working more and more toward splitting WriteFreely (the open source project) from Write.as (the hosted service), so the software project can live more independently.
Among other aspects, WriteFreely funding has been closely intertwined with Write.as — our company provides the funds for all project infrastructure, events, developers we hire, etc. Indeed, we’ve actually recommended that people support the project by paying for a Write.as Pro subscription. This funds the work of course, but it also comes with an entire hosted service attached, at whatever price we set. So I wanted to improve that.
Now, we’ve set up separate funding infrastructure that will be solely dedicated to #WriteFreely, so people can support our work more flexibly, without worrying about getting more than they need (in our case, a hosted service). Donations go to a dedicated place, where they’ll only be used for funding the costs of developing, maintaining, and growing WriteFreely.
If you’d like to support the project, now you can donate on Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors. You’ll also notice a Sponsor button at the top of our GitHub repo, in case you want to donate in the future!
Thoughts? Discuss...
Spending time designing an entirely new UI for Write.as / #WriteFreely today, tailored toward power users. After breaking down jobs-to-be-done and building up an interface from scratch, I’ve arrived at… essentially, WordPress or Ghost or any other CMS. So, how do I plan to make this different?
First: two distinct interfaces, “basic” and “advanced.” This CMS-ish UI would be the “advanced” one, activated only when you indicate you need it, such as when starting a publication rather than a personal blog. By default, users would continue getting a minimalist interface that is centered around writing and distribution, rather than advanced content creation and management. My idea here is that we hopefully don’t lose the plot, and Write.as remains useful as a personal writing / blogging platform. But if I’m rethinking things, I’ll probably want to revamp the “basic” UI users will see by default…
#design #publishers
Thoughts? Discuss...